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Daxeel’s pain is a part of him. Back then, I never realized, never gave much thought to it, his history, his misery.

Maybe if his flesh was never torn apart by his father, maybe if his father loved his mother the way one should love their evate, then my slight of him wouldn’t have cut him so deeply. Maybe we would find forgiveness sooner, easier than what we do.

‘That’s what you see when you look at me.’

‘What else is there?’

He spoke those ugly words with such tenderness. The realization of it aches a pulsing, crushing sensation in my chest, an echo in a hollow cave.

Daxeel never gave much thought to my pain, either.

He sees me as little more than a privileged brat, let himself believe that my father only ever lectured me after he found me under the willows with Daxeel.

I wonder if we were honest with one another, if we let each other in that bit more, how differently we would see each other. I wonder why I don’t tell him the truth of that night, what father did to me, and the true lengths of my punishment.

Most of all, I wonder—do I have the strength to keep fighting these battles in my pitiful life?

My hand lowers to the pillow I rest my temple on.

For a while, I watch his back, the curve of it rising and falling with his steady breaths. He’s found peace in his slumber. Might be the scent of me in the bedchamber with him that keeps his rest so soothing. Might be the cruel satisfaction of his slight victory.

I ache to reach out for him, to touch his scars and kiss them away, to whisper sorrys that he doesn’t care to hear because they mean so little to him. A part of me now understands why.

Sorrys don’t remove the scars.

He has faced,endured, too many betrayals in his life, and mine cut deeper than those scars.

I leave him untouched.

Gently, I slip out of the bed and creep over to the crumpled chemise on the floor. Silent, like the Quiet we’re inching out of, closer to the humidity of the Warmth, I peel the cotton slip from the rug, and I cut a look ahead, to the piles of ribbons, tulle, satin and a shredded corset. The remnants of a gown.

I pull on the chemise as I sneak out of the room.

And with one look back at Daxeel before I shut the door on him, I see that he doesn’t stir.

The washroom isn’t easy to find.

The doors confuse me, the wood that’s sometimes smooth with a lacquered blue, and other times blotched with crimsons and yellows, but always a shifting colour, changeable—and I understand now that the doors are enchanted.

I wander the fourth floor, eyeing up doors the deepest shade of blue, as dark as Daxeel’s eyes, some a grimy shade of grey—like when Knife washes my white dresses with my black breeches to annoy me, and the white is never quite the same again—and others as black as tar.

It isn’t until I come across a regular door of carved wood that looks softer to the touch than silk, that the magick of it reveals itself to me.

The door unlocks itself.

I stumble back and watch it as fiercely as I would watch a faerie hound advancing on me.

Then, as though pushed by an invisible hand, it creaks open all the way—and reveals a black marble washroom.

I know enough about enchantments to recognize expensive tricks when I see them. Self-opening doors, colour coded—an enchantment that cost some gold and then more.

I fast figure out two colours and what they mean. Blue is sleep; in that room, someone is resting. Ordinary, untouched wood means the room beyond it is unoccupied.

The other colours, I still have to learn.

Right now, my focus is stolen completely by the door across the washroom, the one with the chamber pot on the other side.

I do my business, then take care to wash my body with a cloth before I leave to find the kitchens.